A Statement on Professional Conduct from the Provost and Main Campus Deans

In an effort to use multiple channels of communication, I use this post to duplicate an email sent to faculty and staff:


Universities are environments devoted to exchanging alternative ideas and perspectives. For that reason, an academic community is uniquely dependent on the assurance of civility and professional conduct for all its members.

Bullying has no place at Georgetown. Here, care for the whole person, cura personalis, focuses attention on empathy towards others, not on attention to ourselves or to whether our own needs are being met. Caring for others can mean actively listening to those with different views. It can mean reframing one’s comments or changing one’s actions, out of respect for others’ concerns. For those in authority, it means sensitivity to power differentials during conversations. It means allowing others to uphold their beliefs, while maintaining one’s own beliefs. Each of us must behave with respect for others, even while disagreeing on some subject matter.

Georgetown faculty, staff, and students spend many hours each week in joint work, interacting both one-on-one and in larger groups, to execute the mission of the university. These interactions cumulatively produce an organizational culture, a set of expected behaviors based on shared norms and values. Thus, each of us, acting in concert with others, creates the culture of Georgetown. Of course, the university has policies to undergird these norms, and those of us in authority roles have obligations to enforce rules of behavior that are consistent with these norms of behavior. But, civility requires that each of us continuously evaluates our own actions. As faculty, staff, and students at this University, it is our privilege – and our responsibility – to model the behavior we seek in others.

Robert M. Groves, Provost
Paul Almeida, Dean of the McDonough School of Business
Maria Cancian, Dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy
Rosario Ceballo, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences
Joel Hellman, Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
Kelly Otter, Dean of the School of Continuing Studies
Alexander Sens, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences